SEO is practiced by bloggers and professionals to bring traffic to their websites or their customers websites for free from search engines, and when I say search engines I mean Google, because that’s where the big traffic comes from. If you want to practice SEO you must first understand what is SEO, and how destructive can SEO be if you use it unwisely.

There are 2 types of SEO that you can practice, white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO is all about getting your site viral and getting organic backlinks from bloggers and other sites, which is extremely hard and time consuming while black hat SEO is about using blasting software and automated link building tools to spam blogs, forums and web 2-0 sites with spun content and “that’s nice” comments. Black hat SEO is wrong, and won’t get you anywhere in the long term and white hat SEO is extremely hard to execute and you need to make your site viral before you can receive those high quality contextual organic backlinks.

So which type of SEO should you practice? Well I’m not here to tell you which one to choose, I’m here to make you understand what is SEO and to present all your options so you can choose which one suits you best. An optimum option would be to combine white hat SEO and black hat SEO and get faster results for longer term duration. This is called gray hat SEO, and it is used by most of the professionals that have learned that automation and spun content will never trick Google but in order to gain organic links you have to give your site a starting bump up the SERPs.

What is gray hat SEO? Well, it is way better than black hat SEO and less luck-based than white hat SEO. Basically, after you finish your on-page SEO and content writing you should start building backlinks that look as natural as possible. How should you build those backlinks? Well, there are various methods depending on your budget or time to spend and I’m going to list them below along with their advantages and disadvantages.

Blog Commenting and Forum Posting

Blog commenting and forum posting might get you valuable high quality links but it’s very time consuming and with a low success rate. Of course you can outsource this to a VA on odesk and save you time but it will add extra expenses to your SEO campaign.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can bring extra link juice but it is not enough to rank medium competition keywords. If you choose to use social bookmarking you must either target low competition keywords or use an extra backlinking method to help. There are certain tools that can help you automate the bookmarking process, but don’t automate it too much because you risk falling into the dark side.

Private Blog Networks

Private blog networks can help you achieve good rankings for almost any keyword, depending on your niche and budget. There are a couple of popular private blog networks, and they’re all good. If you decide on using blog networks than I’d suggest that you pick at least 2 for diversifying your inbound links a little, as some of them offer homepage links and other inner page links.

So what is SEO after all? Well, it’s 90% link building and 10% planning and on-page optimization. Subscribe to my blog and you’ll be the first to know about new link building tools and fresh SEO tips as soon as they hit the online world.

On-page SEO means the optimization of your site’s pages to meet Google’s requirements: faster load times, title tags, META descriptions, keyword rich content and so on. This is the easy part, and it can be done with ease by almost anybody as there are only a few guidelines that you should follow, but as this blog is focused on link building we’re going to skip the on-page SEO tutorial and focus more on link building strategies.

Of-page SEO is also known as Link Building and it is the most important part of SEO ( 90% of the whole SEO process ). As Google and other search engines constantly update their algorithms, SEO link building gets harder and harder and as the old link building strategies are discovered by search engines new ones emerge fueling the cat and mouse game called SEO.

If you want to make your link building efforts count than you must build your links that look natural and come from high quality relevant pages from all over the web. Well, getting links is hard enough, but building high quality links is almost impossible if you have a fairly new website and want to build links in the old fashion, thru blog commenting and forum posting. This is where link building companies step in, and offer high end SEO assets like private blog networks and automated software. I personally hate automated link building software, because everybody uses them, and they quickly become useless as patterns emerge and search engines detect and ignore all the links built with them.

About Private Blog Networks, well, they are the real deal. You have to know that SEO firms and Internet Marketers build their own private blog networks that they use only for their business and build links only to their sites or their client’s sites. Building a blog network is expensive and it requires a lot of knowledge and work to keep it under Google’s radar, but a blog network can make the difference. Why? Because a good private network will have at least 200 or 300 high Page Rank, high authority blogs that will link to your site and this will trick Google into thinking that your site is important, thus placing it in the top of the search results.

A link built from a Page Rank 3 page counts more than 3000 links built from a Page Rank 0 page, and you will be getting hundreds of those, from hundreds of different aged, trusted, high Page Rank blogs.

So, to make it more simple, Private Blog Networks are the link building strategy of the future ( or at least of 2012 ) and if don’t have one yet than I suggest that you build one, or use one built by somebody else.

You don’t afford building your own blog network but you want to succeed with your SEO link building campaigns? No problem, you can just “rent” one from companies that offer these kind of link building services and instead of paying $10000-$20000 for building a network of your own with 100 sites, you can rent 100 of their blogs for $100 – $200 / month.

One of the most popular and efficient blog networks is available at “ThePrivateNetwork.net”, and I have to say that they also have the lowest prices out there. This is only a hint for to get you started, but there are lots of other blog networks out there, but make sure that you make the right choice once you decide to join.

This is it for now, but stay tuned as I will post all the latest SEO link building strategies and tips as soon as they emerge.